Recent updates

1/24/2012	The leaders page has been updated, given the standard navigation bar at the top and now displaying the best adventures of the past day, week, month, and year by both XP gained and treasure recovered.
1/17/2012	On adventures, enemy groups are now identified on the map by an appropriate monster icon instead of the generic crossed swords icon. Also, each player group will display one small heart for every character in the group, with the color of the heart reflecting the health of the character.
1/13/2012	Three corrections have been made. One was to bow damage, where the strength bonus/penalty is only half as large. The second is to group setup sizes, where fractional values were being dropped leading to some oversized groups erroneously being labeled as legal. The third was to auto-equip your fist item when removing a weapon, and to prevent the fist from being unequippable. Additionally, as always, many refinements to monster equipment and treasure have been made in the past week and at least a dozen new items have been added.
1/7/2012	Our ISP is having some big problems updating their equipment in this area, causing some outages in the past few days. Over the next week there will be some additional inturruptions, hopefully brief.
1/1/2012	The amounts that skill learning rates change when a character gains a level or learns a new skill have been adjusted. Characters will see more rapid improvements at lower levels, although as skill values get extremely high the learning rates will begin to drop more quickly.
12/23/2011	Clan rankings have been moved onto the main page. Clan power is now the total combat value of all clan members, while wealth remains the total of clan gold, character gold, and the sale value of all character items.
12/16/2011	A new first level monster was added, while the feared kobold wizard was given a very slight upgrade. Enough to move it up to the second monster level and thus be less common in the easiest adventures where it has been particulary deadly.
12/14/2011	You will notice a clan net worth value on the main page. This is the worth of your clan calculated by adding clan gold, all character money, and the average sale value of all character equipment. The net change today is the amount this has changed since the current clan day began. Note that when you click "next day" a lot of clan money gets spent, so each clan day the net change value will begin as a negative number. As you collect treasure adventuring, it will increase. This is a nice measure of financial gain/loss during the current clan day. Obviously you will not be able to bring the net change above zero every clan day, but it is something to strive for!
12/11/2011	In the interest of helping new players learn the game, I have written a quick-and-dirty two-part tutorial that walks you through the first two days of a brand new clan. While very informal, if you are a newer player who is confused by the game basics you might find it a useful read. Part one and part two are available in the forums.
12/10/2011	To help streamline the party formation process a new QuickParty option has been added. Forming QuickParties forgoes the need to name a party and jumps straight to group setup. A gamewide difficulty adjustment has been made. The assumption of 50 normal adventures needed per level has produced adventures of extreme difficulty for most players. Accordingly the model has been returned to 100 adventures per character level at normal difficulty. Mythic adventures require around 10 adventures per character level, while introductory adventures will require in the vincinity of 500. If you were doing fine with normal adventures you can get the same 50-adventures-per-level results by using the verh hard setting. As an approximation, all difficulty settings are roughly two steps removed from prior levels (the old very easy is the new normal; the old dangerous is the new mythic).
12/2/2011	New tools for party formation have been added. On the people page, a select all and a deselect all button have been added. Furthermore, when a party is created or selected, a new button will appear called initial group setup. Clicking this will take you to a new page where you can designate the starting groups for the party. For most parties this is irrelevant since they are just a single legal group. However multi-group parties will be able to use this page to specify how the characters will divide into starting groups.
11/25/2011	There is a new "rookie learning bonus" for low level characters. If all characters on an adventure are level 1, they will earn 3x xp. If they are all levels 1-2 they will all earn 2x xp. If there are any level 3+ characters, xp earned is normal.
11/25/2011	WARNING! The new changes (see below) make adventures for level 2+ characters a lot harder than before. Be very careful adventuring. Normal adventures are no longer easy for an average party and many players may even find simple adventures to be a big challenge.
11/25/2011	There has been a major update that affects character levels and XP, monster XP and treasure, adventure levels, clan-day expenses, and everything derived from any of these values. Please read the details here.
11/23/2011	Some major changes are obvious to regular players. First, the layout of the main page has been updated. This is an ongoing process so expect some more changes over the coming days. Most of the changes have revolved around simplifying the display and adding short descriptive text messages to help guide newer players through the process of creating characters and parties, starting adventures, and finding the next day button. Adventure selection has changed. Random adventures are the same as always, but regular adventures require you to select what party to use. You don't need to use a pre-saved party, however; if any of your characters are ready there will be a use selected characters option which acts identically to the pre-party system. Yet another complete overhaul of monster experience, treasures, and other statistics is underway. The net result will be that the most common monsters at each adventure level will change to improve balance and the overall gaming experience. You will find little difference at the low end, but the higher levels are becoming easier with a combination of less challenge, more experience, and more treasure from each adventure.
11/17/2011	A new feature has been added to the people page: parties. A party is a predefined group of characters that adventure together. You may name, save, and delete parties using the tools on the people page. At any one time, you may have a total number of parties defined equal to the number of characters you have in your clan. Selecting a party automatically updates the status of all characters so that those in the party are ready. In the future, parties will be play a more important role in adventure start-up and execution.
11/15/2011	A new chat command, /injuries, has been added. It will list characters on the adventure with the most severe injuries. As always, chat /help for a list of supported commands.
11/15/2011	As you have no doubt noticed, the interface is being slowly upgraded to a black background and (hopefully) more professional-looking layout. Over the next few days the main screen will be undergoing infrequent adjustments while different layouts are considered. Significantly, a new people page has been added to view your characters. More information is available on this page than in the old table on the main page, including combat statistics and combat value (CV). Soon character information will be removed from the main page entirely. Although not mentioned in the updates, over 100 new equippable items have been added in the past month and almost every aspect of the game has been reviewed and rebalanced. This includes monster frequency and treasure rates, skill costs and availability for various classes as well as attribute qualification thresholds, some spell effect and cost adjustments, and many wholesale revisions of equipment costs and properties.
10/14/2011	Equipment updates continue. Most recently, all types of two handed swords have gotten more dangerous (and expensive) and ring prices underwent a major revision (down at the low-end, up at the high-end). Unrelated: undead are now immune to fatigue.
10/13/2011	Clans who have bought a portal to their own clan worlds (for 25 clan gold, on the clan page) may move characters through. The clan worlds are rather undeveloped and the only danger is that you might run out of water and die. Be very careful to check the water of zone 1 in your clan world every day, and if it ever runs low, you must evacuate everyone to Mythic City to avoid the loss of your characters. More information, messaging, and help will be available for this soon. When in your clan world, characters may not participate in any adventures, nor contribute to daychanges in any way (i.e. no healing spells, taxation, etc). Characters must pay a cost equal to 1 coin per XP to move to the clan world (minimum cost: 100) but moving back to Mythic City is free. There is one benefit to moving to your clan world: while there, characters do not require any monetary upkeep from the clan. In summary, moving to the clan world puts a character "on hold" where they cannot adventure or contribute to the clan, but do not count toward clan expenses or housing limits. They will, incidentally, still age and receive normal healing checks. Again, there is an undocumented risk of death on the clan worlds if you run out of water so please be very careful with this.